For decades, one of the most popular formats for the presentation of analog image content has been the collage. Artful juxtaposition of photographs in a collage creates a visually attractive layout bereft of the repetitive structure that the eye can so easily detect. Collages represent a certain lack of orderliness that breaks away from other more structured alternatives of visually displaying images. However, a good collage depends in part on an analysis of the content itself. For example, it is important to overlap images, but not by so much that the layering results in the covering of a face or some other object of interest in an image.
Manual creation of good collages of analog images is a very labor intensive process, requiring numerous rearranging and reordering of images. Likewise, manual creation of good collages of digital images is also a very labor intensive process requiring a large amount of time spent manipulating arrangements and positions of digital images, for example, with an image editing computer program.
Automated methods for creating collages of digital images currently exist, however they suffer from many shortcomings. These existing automated methods tend to fall into two categories; a safe collage creation method, and an aggressive collage creation method.
In the safe collage creation method, collages are created with only a very small amount of overlap between images. Collages created with the safe method often look more akin to a tiling of images than to an artfully created collage. This minimal overlap helps prevent the occlusion of faces and other important image details, but it typically results in a very boring collage that is not visually pleasing. Furthermore, even with this minimal overlap, faces and other important features are often arbitrarily obscured when they are located near the edge of an image.
In the aggressive collage creation method, collages are created with aggressive overlap of one image atop another. Collages created using the aggressive method pack images efficiently into a viewing region, but the most interesting content of the images is often obscured. Though it is possible to create a good collage this way, it is more likely that faces or interesting areas of images will be arbitrarily occluded, thus resulting in a collage that is not visually pleasing.
Templated collages are collages that are formatted into the approximate shape of a template, such as, for example: a letter, a word, a number, a figure, or some design. Automated templated collages can be created by the safe and aggressive methods previously described, and suffer the same draw backs previously described. A templated collage can also be created by “cutting” a desired shape out of an existing collage. However, because this method arbitrarily cuts out images and parts of images that lie outside of the cut-out portion, important features of images, such as faces, are often arbitrarily eliminated during the cutting process.
With the rapid rise in use of digital cameras and powerful viewing devices such as personal computers, the need to display multimedia content in an attractive manner is becoming increasingly prevalent. The templated collage is a pleasing and useful method for displaying images. However, as described, current methods for creating good templated collages of digital images are either labor intensive or else suffer from drawbacks which result in the automated creation of unpleasing collages or collages which arbitrarily eliminate interesting or important portions of the images in the collage.
The drawings referred to in this description should not be understood as being drawn to scale unless specifically noted.